hi I'm Ron Smith and the su extension horticulturist and tree wrapping in the fall is a good idea on tender bark trees and this would usually be include young apple trees pear trees plum trees cherry trees things like that any young tree would benefit from being wrapped wrapping does not keep the tree warm at what it does it does two things actually it protects the tree from Sun scald it also protects the tree from the the rodents chewing on the on the bark actually girdling the bark and killing the tree so it's a good idea to to wrap the trees there's several products on the market I have a tendency to like the the what's called Kraft paper which is a stretchable paper sent with a sandwich of of some tire in between it so it gives it a protection there and it seems to do a pretty good job of keeping the bunnies out and it's fairly easy to go ahead and and employ here's an example of some old Sun scald and you can see that the tree has done a pretty good job of healing itself and it's gotten a tougher bark over the years and so it's going to come through this okay we hope a couple of years ago if they had wrapped this tree we wouldn't have had the Sun scald showing up like you see right here the Sun does not skull the bark of the tree but what happens actually on the south and the west sides of the tree of tender bark trees is at the Sun on a clear winter day with snow all around it reflecting a light back can have that bark temperature get up to what's called a physiologically active temperatures where you're going to have the cell tissue they're starting to transpire get into some kind of physiological activity considered quote-unquote plant growth become tender and then the Sun Goes Down or goes behind the cloud and the air temperatures at say 10 degrees or below zero suddenly that that bark is subjected to that very very cold air and you get this fissure in your splitting of that bark tissue and that's what's called Sun scald so this wrapping a protective layer around that tree will help to control that Sun scald from ever developing and what we want to do is we want to start on the bottom and wrap our way up to the top you want to get yourself as close to the base of the trees you possibly can or reasonably can reasonably tight because it's stretchable material make sure you overlap one year when we did this we had a young apple tree just a little whip of an apple tree and we wrapped it and we got it up to the first branching and we had so much snow that year that the snow came right up to the first branches okay the rabbits walked across the top of the snow and ate the branches right back to the snow line where which is where the tree wrap was and so I was all set to take the tree out in my wife says no no no wait let's just wait see what happens here and so the tree came out from that point and did a good job okay now we've gone up as far as we need to and then we can take and cut this and then tape it up here just to helps us here to help us secure it you